Semi-OT: IMHOsubplot(m, n, p) is only marginally better thansubplot(mnp). Figuring out what the p-th element always confuses me and is a lot of cognitive overhead. Unless we're making a point on using pyplot (which I think hassubplot as the canonical way of adding multiple plots) we should switch tosubplots().

@timhoffm I agree, but thats afar bigger job.

And theplt.subplot(m, n, p) grammar isvery ingrained, and is at least well-defined.

Converselysubplot(mnp) is a really old grammar that causes genuine problems because it only applies to 9 or fewerrows and columns subplots.

Anybody usingmnp orm, n, p with p > 9 must be a genius or a masochist. 😆 But I agree that we should do the change proposed here.

BTW, we could addp = i, j so thatsubplot(4, 4, (0, 3)) would be the top right edge. Would need to decide on 0-based vs. 1-based here, which is a bit unclear as the scalar p is 1-based, but I still would use numpy/matrix indexing. But that's for another time.

subplot(i, j, (k, l)) basically already exists, except that it's spelledsubplot2grid((i, j), (k, l)) (zero-based indexing). I guesssubplot2grid is so obscure though that also having the functionality insubplot may not be a bad idea? (not that I claim any understanding of what is good taste in a pyplot-centered workflow...).

And when you think you know all the miraculous ways you can create an Axes, there‘s always one more API ... 😩. I‘m really not sure we should change any of these API anymore unless we have a greater plan which and how these should be used (and maybe soft-deprecate some).

This is only referring tom, n, (i, j) not to the contents of this PR.

Well, we already havem, n, (start, stop), at least until it was broken ;-) Please see#17343

I would be happy to see the 3-digit form go--but we're still stuck with it in theaxes_grid family, I see, which also has the idiosyncraticnrows_ncols kwarg.

I don't see any reasons not to merge this, but it's grown a bunch of conflicts now.

👍 on the PR. It's proably easier to redo this from scratch using regex serach&replace than handling all the conflicts.

I only relearn regexp every 6 months or so, so this may have to wait, or anyone else is welcome to take this up instead!

Most cases have been addressed via the above PRs.

Still open: More complex layouts that are not full single-cell grids. These can be handled usingsubplot_mosaic, but I'd like to wait until the single-line notation#18763 is in.

I'll go ahead and close this, but feel free to restore if you need it to track the issue...